Thursday, April 2, 2015

Thursday Movie Picks - Teen Comedies

Written as part of the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. To participate, just pick three movies related to the week's theme. It's easy and fun!
This week's Thursday Movie Picks theme is Teen Comedies. So many and yet so few to choose from!

Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) This Tina Fey-scripted, Lindsay Lohan-starring film is now a bona fide classic, and thank God for that. It's one of the funniest, smartest, most rewatchable films of the '00s. The quotable lines are endless, the comic performances are iconic (Amy Poehler and Rachel McAdams - funniest mother-daughter pair ever?), and the visual gags are untoppable (THE BUS)! And it's also surprisingly resonant - check out what I wrote about it for The Film Experience's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series a while back. In a perfect world, this would have gotten Oscar noms for Fey's script as well as the performances of Rachel McAdams and/or Amanda Seyfried.

Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999) If you haven't seen this, man are you in for a treat. The title refers, of course, to Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, 37th President of the United States. Betsy and Arlene (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, at their teenage best) are just two regular teenage girls in the 1970s, trying to win a date with Tad Hamilton heartthrob singer Bobby Sherman. But instead, they witness part of the Watergate scandal. In order to buy their silence, Nixon makes them the Official Presidential Dog Walkers. But then they discover the President's not-so-nice side, and decide to get revenge as only teenage girls can. Dick is hilarious and surprisingly sweet, with killer performances from Williams and Dunst, a very funny cameo from Will Ferrell, and a great, atypical Nixon in Dan Hedaya. And also: AMAZING costumes.

Whip It (Drew Barrymore, 2009) Okay this MIGHT be stretching it a bit, but Whip It is so good that I don't really care. Ellen Page is typically wonderful as the directionless teen Bliss, whose mother (Marcia Gay Harden) makes her compete in beauty pageants... because that's what you do in Texas when your mother is a former beauty queen. But one day, she and her best friend Pash go to check out this thing called Roller Derby, and Bliss is so excited by it that she tries out for a team - and makes it. And, as is typical in both teen flicks and sports flicks, she learns more about Who She Is and Becomes A Better Person in the process. Drew Barrymore directed this, and also features as Smashley Simpson, a member of Bliss's roller derby team, the Hurl Scouts - along with Kristen Wiig (Maggie Mayhem), Zoe Bell (Bloody Holly), Juliette Lewis (Iron Maven), and Ari Graynor (Eva Destruction). The film is alternately tough and sweet, just like its heroine, and it's good enough that it makes you wish Barrymore would hop back into the director's chair sometime soon.

...the benefit of forgetting to write this the day before and seeing what everyone else picked to make sure you pick something different LOL. But also looked ahead to future themes and some of them overlap, so I decided to save some films for later.

And I'm glad I did, because both Dick and Whip It are hidden, somewhat forgotten gems.

Mean Girls is everywhere today! A really fun movie, if Lohan had only been able to stay the course. Whip It is an interesting choice, I didn't love it but that had more to do with my indifference (sorry) to Ellen Page than the film itself. Love that one of your picks is Dick, an inventive choice and everyone in it does great work. Bobby Sherman was SUCH a big thing in his day.

I have a weakness for teen comedies, sometimes they're dumb but if I come across one I'll watch so I had a hard time narrowing down and I ended up with extras. I'm posting one separately with some trivia about that choice. I know you like Hollywood lore so I hope you enjoy it.

So my others are:

Fired Up! (2009)-Two high school jocks, played by two actors who are in their mid-twenties if they're a day, think they've discovered the perfect hunting ground for girls, Cheer Camp!! Zany, utterly ridiculous, highly enjoyable comedy is far more fun than it has any right to be because of a game cast and two hilarious supporting performances by Juliette Goglia as Poppy, the mini tycoon sister of one of the main characters and John Michael Higgins as Coach Keith the clueless, hyperactively happy leader of the camp.

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991)-A breezy, silly comedy with good performances and a snappy pace. The whole setup is preposterous but once this one gets past its bumpy intro scenes it actually becomes a more focused story of a young girl finding her way through unexpected responsibilities. Christina Applegate, Joanna Cassidy and Keith Coogan make the film better than it should be.

And two that are the male/female sides of the same coin: the high school ugly duckling turned into a swan and then falling for their Svengali.

Can't Buy Me Love (1987)/She's All That (1999)- In Can't Buy Me Love when a nerd played by Patrick Dempsey realizes the most popular girl in school is in a spot he pays her to help him get noticed by the IN crowd. In She's All That jock Freddie Prinze, Jr. makes a bet that he can turn wallflower Rachael Leigh Cook into the prom queen. Best part-the prom turns into a full blown musical number with EVERYONE knowing the steps to a complicated dance routine! I bust out laughing every time that scene comes along.

OMG Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead! LOVE that movie! I remember kinda wanting to see Fired Up! back in the day, but feared it would only pale in comparison to Bring It On, the ne plus ultra of cheerleading on film. Can't Buy Me Love - Patrick Dempsey SIGH <3. She's All That was THE movie back when it came out. Or at least, it was among teenagers (I was 15). That prom dance is my absolute favorite! It's totally apropos of nothing and COMPLETELY amazing!

...INDIFFERENCE to Ellen Page? I'm sorry. I don't understand. Juno is such a magnificent performance that I can forgive the missteps she's made since then (of which I don't think Whip It is one).

Fired Up! is very silly but it's a guilty pleasure of mine. There is a scene in it while they are at "Cheer Camp" where the entire group is at an outdoor screening of Bring It On and they're repeating the dialogue word for word by memory! And the two lead guys are quite dishy too.

A Date with Judy (1948)-A time capsule of teen-hood in the movies in the 40's. Jane Powell and Elizabeth Taylor are best friends competing for the same guy, an impossibly young Robert Stack, and various other minor problems mixed in. Jane sings several songs along the way aided at times with music courtesy of Xavier Cugat, his band and a delightful, outlandishly dressed Carmen Miranda in garish Technicolor, take special note of her shoes and wonder how she could possibly walk in them! This makes a good contrast with what teen comedies have become today and yet the main theme of getting the guy/girl or making them jealous has stayed the same. It's just presented in a different way.

This also serves as a study of three young stars in flight, Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor and Scotty Beckett: one just cresting the wave of fame, one on the ascendant and one beginning a descent that became a spiral, and the difficulties of transitioning out of childhood fame.

Jane Powell was a topline star, as she is here, and she had broken through as a sort of replacement teen Judy Garland, who had moved on to adult stardom. She's pert and full of youthful exuberance at which she excelled. That very spryness though became a type of prison limiting her casting and when musicals declined in popularity in the mid-fifties made it impossible for her to transition to other types of pictures, she remained an active performer but mostly on stage.

Elizabeth Taylor, just 16 and a knockout already under the heavy makeup, was just starting to flirt with adulthood on screen after a successful period as a child star, obviously she made the transition-within two years she had moved fully into adult roles and soon after the superstardom that lasted until her death. Of the three she already has an air of maturity even though she was the youngest. Fun fact: she and Jane Powell were bridesmaids at each others first weddings-For Jane the first of five, for Liz the first of eight!

Then there's Scotty Beckett as Jane's gangly boyfriend and Elizabeth's brother, the unfortunately named Oogie. A major child star throughout his youth he was struggling to move into adult stardom. He couldn't make the leap and within the year started the long slide into trouble with the law, a drunk driving accident that left him crippled and drug addiction that ended in his suicide two decades later at 38. Along with Bobby Driscoll, a similarly successful child actor, he was the model for and voiced Disney's Peter Pan, whose career also faultered as he grew and who ended up a hopeless drug addict dying at 31 in an abandoned tenement in New York unknown, unclaimed and buried in Potter's Field, he's one of the more heartbreaking of Hollywood stories.

Yeah, I knew Whip It was stretching it, but she's a teenager and it's fun and it follows a lot of the typical teen movie tropes because it was based on a YA novel. So I figured it was close enough lol.

About Me

Performer since birth, tap dancer since the age of 10. Life-long book-lover. Film obsessive. Frustrated artist since college graduation. Non-profit database specialist by day, tap teacher by night, Netflix binge-watcher by weekend.